Grey Matter Issue 67 | Winter 2015 Building on 32 years of software know how Visual Studio 2015 One environment for building multi-platform apps Safety first Backup options for the modern world Software in education The new curriculum: teaching code in schools See page 8 WIN! for details Contents Welcome 4 Software News Embarcadero,Flexera, Intel, Microsoft and more. Editorial There are some things we’re happy to pay for, and some things 7 News in brief Editor: .....................................................................Matt Nicholson we’re not, and in the digital world, there’s little rhyme or Technical editors: .. Sean Wilson, Paul Edwards and competition winners. reason between the two. I am quite happy to pay the BBC nearly £150 Editorial advisor: ............................................Julia Hopkins 8 Competition News editor: ...................................................... Paul Stephens a year for the privilege of watching a handful of TV channels without Publisher: ..................................................................Andrew King being interrupted by inane advertising, and up until just a few years Win a Sony camcorder! Contributors: ....................................................Tim Anderson, Simon Bisson, Mary Branscombe, Jon ago, there were enough people prepared to pay for mobile phone Honeyball, Graham Keitch, Paul Stephens ringtones to create a billion dollar industry. And yet we still seem 10 Visual Studio 2015 Design and layout: ..................................... Jason Stanley unwilling to pay anyone for accessing their website, preferring instead Inside this major new Illustration: ............................................................Sholto Walker to enter into an ambiguous and often downright dangerous development platform. Web Design: ........................................................Jason Stanley Marketing: ..............................................................Ash Khagram relationship with a largely unknown collection of marketing companies. Tel: 01364 654100 Walk into a cinema, buy a ticket with cash, and you can watch a Email: [email protected] film without the cinema having any idea who you are. As long as you’ve got a valid ticket, they’re happy. Even if you pay by credit card, HardCopy is edited for Grey Matter three times a year by Matt Publishing. It is printed the cinema would have to take deliberate and indeed illegal steps to by Pepper Communications in Plymouth. intercept the data transferred between you and the credit card company. Buy a ticket through the same cinema’s website, though, Copyright © 2015 Grey Matter Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be and the chances are that you will be asked, at the very least, for your reproduced in any form without prior email address, so providing them with a unique key that can be linked consent of the copyright holder. to any other personal data held by any other website that has your 16 Containers All trademarks acknowledged. email address. What they are and the HardCopy is a trademark and Grey Matter a problems they can solve. registered trademark owned by Grey Matter Exactly how little we think about such matters has been Limited. While all reasonable attempts are highlighted by the many data hacks that have occurred recently, the 19 Safety first made to ensure accuracy, Grey Matter and most recent at the time of writing being the exposure of more than 30 The latest solutions for Matt Publishing disclaim any liability backing up your systems. whatsoever for any use of information million people signed up to the adultery website Ashley Madison, herein. Prices exclude VAT unless specified. most of whom obviously felt quite safe entering their email addresses 24 Software in education and, in some cases, real names. Getting excited about Cover Images: Anikei/Shutterstock coding in the classroom. Xerography/Shutterstock Yes, creating and maintaining a website costs money, and that ©Adobe Stock/macrovector needs to be recouped. The current model, adopted by all but a few 29 Inside Data notable exceptions, is to sell on personal data, either directly or Using Oracle PaaS. Advertisers Index indirectly by selling advertising opportunities. Quite why a cinema 30 Straight talking chain needs to do this is another matter, as it is presumably already Opinion: is Microsoft 2 Microsoft EMS making money from selling the tickets themselves, but the model has Office frozen in time? 7 Intel Media Server proved so successful, and we so happy to accept it, that no-one seems 32 And Another Thing 9 Visual Studio 2015 interested in considering any other. Opinion: Jon Honeyball is 12 Intel Parallel Studio Of course there are other business models that could be adopted, impressed for a change. 15 C++Builder 10 Seattle and were even considered way back when the Web was young. 34 Short Cuts 18 InstallShield 2015 Micro-payments, for example, charged every time you view a page, Views from the edge. 20 VMware were considered and even made it to a W3C Working Draft in 1999, 23 GFI Software but abandoned because the infrastructure couldn’t handle it. However 26 Microsoft Azure in these days of megabit data rates and bitcoin technologies, surely it’s 28 Adobe time to revisit such alternatives. Register Now! 31 SAM Matt Nicholson, Editor, HardCopy HardCopy magazine is published three times 33 Paessler a year. Make sure you don’t miss out by 35 Office 365 registering or updating your details at 36 Veeam www.greymatter.com/hc/subscribe Grey Matter Limited Prigg Meadow, Read HardCopy online Ashburton, Devon, TQ13 7DF, UK To view buyer’s guides, news, blogs and [email protected] forums go to HardCopy online at www.greymatter.com/hc/hardcopy Matt Nicholson grey matter Editor, HardCopy @GreyMatter_News software know how Grey Matter • 01364 654100 • HardCopy 3 News Software News Collaboration gets top billing as Microsoft ships Office 2016 Microsoft • www.greymatter.com/microsoft/ Microsoft has shipped Office 2016, a one-time purchase, but the focus is now heavily OneDrive-buffered email attachments and ‘Mail milestone release of the productivity on the subscription-based, cloud-shipped Triage’ for diverting low-priority messages. Excel suite it originally launched back in 1988. Office 365 product, with the company gains new chart types, one-click forecasting Available for Windows, Mac and Windows promising new feature updates on a monthly and integrated publishing to Microsoft’s Power tablets, with satellite apps for iOS and Android, basis for 365 users. BI enterprise data visualisation system, while the suite’s new features include real-time As before, the Office suite comprises the PowerPoint now features screen recording and co-authoring capabilities imported from core Word, Excel and PowerPoint business handwriting recognition for creating equations, Microsoft’s web-based Office Online, enhanced applications, accompanied (depending on and the latter also works in Word. Office 365 cloud storage including cross-device recent edition) by Outlook (email/calendar), OneNote users also get Office 365 Groups (team document lists, improved data security for (digital notebook), Publisher and Access organisation), 365 Planner (a ‘lite’ project Enterprise users, and integration with the (desktop SQL database), with the specialist Visio management application) and early access to Cortana personal assistant and ‘Hello Windows’ and Project apps available by separate GigJam, a product from Microsoft’s Ambient biometric login. Boxed editions are available for purchase/subscription. Cross-application Computing Team which promises “a enhancements include simplified document breakthrough way for people to involve others sharing and co-authoring via OneDrive and in their business tasks.” 365 subscribers also get SharePoint, with real-time typing updates in 1TB of OneDrive space. Word, plus integrated access to previous Office 2016 runs on Windows 7 or later document versions from SharePoint and (Windows 8 for tablets) and Mac OS X 10.10, OneDrive for Business. Skype for Business with apps available for iOS 7 and Android 4.4 (formerly Lync) video conferencing and instant (KitKat). The Mac version shipped first in July, messaging is also integrated, while usability is with Windows following from late September. enhanced with a new ‘tell me’ feature which Office 365 users face a staggered auto-update generates on-the-fly menus based on search schedule stretching into early 2016, although text, and Bing-powered Smart Lookup for instant manual downloads are available for importing Web-based content directly into most customers. Two boxed editions – Home & documents. Student and Home & Office – are available, each Office 2016 is all about collaboration. Outlook now features permission-based, for Windows and Mac. Intel adds Big Data Analytics to Parallel Studio XE Intel • www.greymatter.com/intel/ Intel has launched Parallel Studio XE (MKL) team, it supports batch, streaming and Advisor tools while the Cluster edition adds the 2016, a new edition of its compilers, distributed processing, is compatible with data MPI tools and libraries. libraries and tools package aimed at High platforms including Hadoop, Spark, R, and Performance Computing (HPC) development. Matlab, and boasts performance gains of up to • Intel has also launched its 6th generation Heading the new features list are the big data 200 times compared to open source Core processors, based on its Skylake crunching Intel Data Analytics Acceleration alternatives.